White Light (Axoplasm Books)

by Rudy Rucker

  I lay down on my bed to rest. Before long I slipped into a dreamless sleep.

  After an indefinite interval of time I woke up with a start. I was covered with sweat, confused. The light outdoors hadn’t changed. The phone was ringing and I picked it up.

  It was the clerk’s smooth voice. “Professor Hilbert is having tea on the terrace with some of his colleagues. Perhaps you’d care to join them. Table number 6,270,891.”

  I thanked him and hung up. The terrace was reached by passing through the lobby. I spotted Franx up on the ceiling, but hurried past before he saw me. From outside, the terrace had looked fairly standard, with about fifty tables around the circumference. But now that I was on it I could see that everything shrank as it approached the middle…so that there were actually alef-null rings of tables around the terrace’s center.

  Already about ten rows in, the tables looked like dollhouse furniture, and the gesticulating diners like wind-up toys. To find Hilbert I’d have to go in better than a hundred thousand rows. Fortunately there was a clear path in, so I could run.

  As on the elevator, the space distortion affected me without my feeling it. When I got to the dollhouse tables, I was doll-sized and they looked perfectly normal to me. I sped towards the center, staring at the strange creatures I passed.

  There was a table of rubbery carrots eating a rabbit stew. Then a whole group of liquid creatures in buckets connected by soda-straws. Then wads of feathers, coils of slimy tendrils, clouds of colored gas. I saw two toads who took turns swallowing each other whole. Some creatures were clusters of lights, others looked like sheets of paper. Some were staring into space, but most were engaged in lively conversations. A large number of them inscribed designs on the tablecloths as they talked, apparently to assist in communicating. Although I had no way of judging, they struck me as an awkward and graceless lot. Waiters whizzed back and forth on roller skates bringing platter after platter from a kitchen somewhere at the center of the terrace.

  Each table had a little card with a number on it, and when I got into the six millions I slowed down a little. There were so many creatures. The endless repetition of individual lives began to depress me…the insignificance of each of us was overwhelming. My vision began to blur and all the bodies on the terrace seemed to congeal into one hideous beast. I lost my footing and slipped, knocking a waiter off his foot.

  He resembled a mushroom with a three-bladed propeller on top, and he wore a single roller-skate on his thick foot. He had been balancing a tray of twitching grubworms on his propeller, and now the grubs were humping off in every direction. One crawled across my bare foot. The mushroom hissed angrily and began gathering up the spilled dainties before they got away.

  I apologized and continued on my way, trying to remember what Hilbert looked like. Before long I spotted three men sitting at a table, two in suits and one in shirtsleeves. With a sudden shock I realized I was looking at Georg Cantor, David Hilbert and Albert Einstein. There was an empty place at their table. I hurried over, introduced myself and asked if I could join them.

  Hilbert and Einstein were absorbed in an animated and infinitely complex discussion, and merely glanced at me. But Cantor pointed to a chair and poured me a cup of tea.

  “I studied Set Theory,” I said to him when I sat down. “I’m interested in the Continuum Problem.” He nodded silently. He was wearing a gray suit and a white shirt with a starched collar. There was something haunted and unhappy about his eyes. He sipped his cup of tea, watching me and keeping his silence.

  “It must make you really happy to be up here with all these infinities,” I said coaxingly.

  “I knew it would be like this,” he said finally.

  “I guess it goes on quite a ways?” I said, gesturing at Mount On.

  “This is only the beginning of the second number class. Beyond lie all the alefs. And beyond that is the Absolute, the Absolute Infinite where, where…” He stopped speaking and stared into the sky.

  I waited quietly for Cantor to finish his sentence. Meanwhile Hilbert ended his conversation with Einstein with a burst of laughter. He stood up to leave, giving me a small nod.

  “I have certain duties. I hope that your stay here will be scientifically fruitful.” And then Hilbert hurried towards the towering hotel, growing ever larger as he moved out of the field in the terrace’s center.

  Hilbert’s remark about science made me uncomfortable. In the last year I had come to the painful realization that nothing I could ever do in mathematics or physics would remotely approach in significance the work of Cantor, Hilbert and Einstein.

  But I made an attempt to appear keen and addressed Cantor again. “The mathematics must be easier here, since you can use infinite proofs. Take number theory, for instance…”

  “You take it,” he replied with a certain venom. “The number theorists despise to use my higher infinities as true numbers. Why should I interest myself in their myopic blunderings?”

  I decided to change the subject. “Well, the…the beings here must certainly take infinity seriously. There must be seminars and…”

  Cantor made an upward gesture of dismissal. “This is a tourist hotel. They live in Dumptowns on the Mainside, perfectly happy with complete finiteness. Once in awhile they come here by tunnel or sea. Most of them don’t even know what they’re looking at.” He made the dismissing gesture again with his right arm. The arm tore loose and flew up into the sky, tumbling end over end.

  “Color me gone,” Cantor said, standing. “But do pay a call. You may be of use. I live with a lady on Mainside near the alef- one tunnel.” He flung up his left arm. It too broke off and whizzed into the sky like a well-thrown tire-iron. He tensed his body as if for a chin-up, then suddenly turned into a ball of white light which rocketed upwards.

  I stared up after him for a full minute. Perhaps that was the trick for reaching the higher infinities. Gingerly I tugged an arm to see if it would come off.

  “The technique is exceptional,” Einstein said, interrupting my thoughts. I had almost forgotten he was there, and turned to look at him. Einstein’s face is so familiar from so many photographs, that to have him actually there gave me an extraordinarily heightened sense of reality. His deep eyes seemed to look through me. “But you’re an exception too,” he said after a minute. “You came here without dying. You haven’t been to the Dump.” He gestured towards the distant slanting sea. “I saw you land. You and a seagull.”

  “That was really a woman,” I explained. “She just likes to look like a seagull.”

  “Exceptional,” Einstein repeated. “Most souls arrive on the other side…Mainside. And they have no choice about what shape they take. Tell me, how did you do it?”

  “Somehow I left my body. I saw Jesus and he told me to come here. Since it’s infinitely far I used relativistic time dilation.”

  Einstein nodded. “That would produce the effect if continued indefinitely.”

  “What effect?” I asked, finally taking a sip of my tea.

  “Becoming a component of the transdimensional radiation loss.” He could see that I didn’t understand, and rephrased it. “To speak in a misleading and superficial way, everything here is made of light. Cimön is a vast surface of light lying at the interface of space and anti-space. This side is called Flipside, and the other side of the surface is called Mainside. When something dies it releases a certain pulse of energy which strikes Mainside and activates an image.”

  “Does it usually take long? For a person to get here when he dies?”

  “It can be instantaneous. In a very real sense Cimön is right next to every point in the ordinary Universe. Of course if you stay in regular space…like you did…then it’s infinitely far away. But there is a trans-dimensional short-cut to Mainside. You’ve used it yourself many times.”

  “Let me get one thing straight. Are you saying that Cimön is a big slab of light? People get here by turning into light?”

  He made a cautioning gesture. “Better t
o call it a wave-like information pattern in a Hilbert-space energy configuration.” Just then a waiter set a dish of vanilla ice-cream down in front of him. Einstein began to eat, considering each spoonful carefully.

  I was wondering how I would reach the higher infinities. I was also trying to figure out how this could all be made of light…my body, the Mountain, the ice-cream. And what did he mean by saying I had been here many times before?

  Einstein laid down his spoon and began to speak again. “Let me tell you a story I once told at a tea in Princeton. The hostess had asked me to explain relativity theory in a few words.” His smile was kind, but with a hint of mischief in it. He leaned back in his chair and told his story.

  “I once had a friend who had been blind from birth. One day we went for a hike in the country. It was hot, and after walking several miles we sat down to rest.

  “‘How thirsty I am,’ I remarked to my friend, ‘I wish I had a cool glass of milk.’

  “‘What is milk?’ my friend replied.

  “‘Milk? Milk is a white fluid.’

  “‘I know what a fluid is,’ my friend responded, ‘But what is white?’

  “‘White is the color of a swan’s feathers.’

  “‘I know what feathers are, but what is a swan?’

  “‘A swan is a large bird with a crooked neck.’

  “‘I can understand that,’ my blind friend replied, ‘Except for one thing. What is crooked?’

  “‘Here,’ I said, seizing his arm and stretching it out. ‘Now your arm is straight.’ Then I folded his arm against his chest. ‘And now your arm is crooked.’

  “‘Ah! Now I know what milk is.’”

  At the end Einstein took hold of my arm and straightened and bent it several times. His hands felt good on me.

  I thought about the story for awhile. It was about the reduction of abstract ideas to immediate experience. I tried to pinpoint the idea I had been trying to understand, the reduction I was looking for. At the table next to us a party of red-orange lawn-mowers were roaring their choppers around as the waiter set down a square yard of trembling purple sod and a quart can of motor oil.

  “It’s hard for me to think,” I said finally. Everywhere I looked was some preposterous beast, some bizarre caper. “It’s so crowded, so noisy.”

  “That’s because we come from a universe with infinitely many inhabited star systems,” Einstein said with a shrug. “And this is one of the very few nice hotels on Flipside.”

  He was staring at his spoon with a peculiar fixity. “I’ve got to be going,” he said slowly and without looking up. “Back to Mainside. If I can just…”

  Suddenly his voice and appearance changed radically. It was as if for an instant he became all men at once. His image was blurred, yet seemed to hold a sharp copy of every face I’d ever seen…although somehow each of those faces looked at me with Einstein’s eyes.

  And then he was gone in a flash of white light.

  No. 11

  Epsilon-Zero

  The uproar on the terrace had spilled back into the lobby. On every side of me creatures gibbered and grimaced – speeding up, slowing down, ceaselessly exchanging noisy information. I had no idea how to leave like Cantor and Einstein had. I was stuck here. I fought my way over to the front desk and tried to get the clerk’s attention.

  He was busy checking in an endless stream of dimpled yellow spheres. They were floating in through the front door thick and fast, and an infinite speed-up ensued. I could hear sounds of frantic activity upstairs. Finally all the smiling spheres had found lodging and the clerk turned to look at me, a little blank with fatigue.

  “I want to start up Mount On…” I began, but he waved me aside and spoke into his microphone for a minute.

  When he had finished talking he sank onto his stool with a sigh, took off his spectacles and began rubbing his face with both hands. “Infinitely many new guests at once,” he groaned. “And they’ll only eat skagel. Why the whole grinning sector has to come together…” Another groan.

  “How did you fit them all in?”

  For once the clerk gave me a straight answer. “We put all the old guests in the even-numbered rooms. All the new ones go in odd-numbered rooms.” He had finished rubbing his nose and eyes and was working on his temples now.

  “You mean all the old guests have to double up?”

  The clerk looked at me pityingly. “No. You move to Room 2. The guy in Room 2 moves to Room 4. Room 3 moves to Room 6.4 to 8. 5 to 10. And so on. This leaves all the odd-numbered rooms vacant for the smilies.”

  I was embarrassed he’d had to tell me. After all, I was supposed to be the expert on transfinite numbers. “I’d like to get started on that mountain,” I said again. “You said something about getting a guide?”

  The clerk stood up and began rummaging in a drawer. “A Guide, yes. A Guide is absolutely essential. Unfortunately we have so few of them…a few hundred…” He handed me a printed form several pages long.

  “Mount On Guide Service Application Form,” I read and let my eye slide down the first page’s labelled blanks. Name. Date and Place of Birth, Date and Place of Death, Cause, Father’s Profession, Education, Employment History, Publications, Awards and Honors, Annual Income in Last Year of Life… My heart sank. “I have to apply to get a Guide?”

  The clerk spread out his hands apologetically. “There are so few of them, so many would-be climbers. We must choose the most stable, the most likely to succeed.” I riffled through the form, looking at the later pages. References. MAG Scores. Purpose of Climb (150 words), Religious Beliefs, Community Services on Mainside. The clerk continued talking. “When you have completed the form you must submit it to one of the Guides through his Assistants. Do you know any Guides’ Assistants?”

  Of course I didn’t know any Assistants. Of course my application would be rejected – one of the less promising, less stable in a pool of infinitely many. I felt like I had slid back into the horrible hopeless charade of looking for a good job. In a sudden burst of fury, I tore the application form in half and trampled it underfoot. “I don’t need any stinking Guides. I don’t want their second-hand God.”

  The clerk was unruffled. “You’ll be leaving?”

  I turned on my heel and walked out through the din to the hotel entrance. Something plucked at my jumpsuit, and I whirled around, ready to kill. It was Franx the giant beetle. I smiled.

  “You spurn me no longer?” he twittered.

  We walked out the front door together. “I saw you rending your application form. A rash act.”

  “Did you apply for a Guide?” I replied as we reached the bottom of the steps.

  “I tried. I went through channels. I debased myself. But the Assistant just threw an apple at me.”

  “‘A benighted xenophobe,’” I chuckled. “To hell with that. I’m climbing. If you come with me, so much the better.”

  We reached the end of the hotel grounds. Ahead of us was a grassy slope ending in the first band of rock. Mount On.

  The field was mostly made of the infinitely branching grass blades. But there were also thousands of little flowers. Stars, cups, bells…every shape, every color. Lovely faint odors wove through the air, and tiny butterflies blundered around happily in the chemical maze.

  I found the walking pleasant, paradisiacal…but Franx had problems. His thin legs and sticky foot pads kept getting tangled in the meadow plants, and I kept having to pull him loose. Despite his size he was not very heavy, and once or twice I actually hoisted him onto my back to get him over a particularly intricate patch of vegetation.

  It took us almost an hour to reach that first band of rock. The gravity made a sudden shift in direction there…a ninety- degree rotation. What had looked like a fifty-foot strip of rocks turned out to be a cliff when I got onto it. Sheer and with small hand-holds. At last Franx had the advantage over me. He scuttled up the face of the cliff in less than a minute.

  I began working my way up slowly, foothold by han
dhold. Below my feet I could see the meadow we’d crossed and the hotel. It felt like if I slipped I’d fall all the way down to the ocean, and I had to fight back a spasm of fear. I could make out a party of four moving across the meadow to my right. They looked confident and business-like. I wondered if that was a Guide in the lead. He looked like an industrial vacuum cleaner on stilts. I was so tired already. The rocks were hurting my bare feet.

  I looked up the twenty remaining feet of cliff, mapping out the handholds I’d use. Franx’s tiny head stared expressionlessly down at me. I looked down past my right foot to see what the Guide was up to. He was pointing a hose at me. Suddenly a flash of light blinded me. Inadvertently I shifted my right foot off its ledge.

  I fell then, and had time only to wonder what would happen to me if I died here. I was in my astral body which had somehow turned solid in this kingdom of light. Could my astral body die? If it did would I move into an even more ethereal form? Would I return to Earth to live as a soulless clod? Or would it just be the end all up and down the line?

  Franx caught me just as I was going to hit. He had raised up his stiff wing-covers, unfolded his iridescent wings, and flown down to snag me. The filmy wings beat frantically against the clear air, and slowly we rose to the top of the cliff. Gravity tilted back, and he set me down in another sweet-smelling meadow.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you could fly? I thought you were just a cockroach.”

  “On my home-world Praha only the lower castes fly. A poet, a philosopher-king like myself is borne in a litter, jewel-encrusted, by tasty flying grubs. It would be more accurate to say that you, Felix, resemble such a grub. More accurate than to compare me to a cockroach.”

  Before I could apologize, Franx had wedged his head under a flat rock and flipped it over. There were a few worms and larvae and he scarfed them right up. I still felt no hunger. It seemed that in Cimön eating and sleeping were things you only had to do if you felt like it.